My first video for the blog

A couple of months ago I entered a challenge on the Smart Passive income blog: to create a Youtube video. I had two months to complete the challenge, until October 31st, and it seemed like a really easy challenge to enter. Entering the challenge would send me a few benefits:

• Being listed on the SPI blog, which gets tens of thousands of visitors a months, would help me get traffic to my site and maybe new regular readers


• I would actually get started at creating videos, something that I have been contemplating for ages but never really started.

Well, as easy as it sounded, I waited until last Thursday to create my video. I was so scared to jump in front of the camera, to put my voice on the screen, and to run dry of ideas, that I never started and kept finding excuses.

But I finally decided to create my video last week and I'm glad I did: it was a lot of fun!

I kept it very simple for my first try and basically did a video version of a blog post I already published: An introduction to design tools for marketers: differences between photoshop, illustrator and indesign.

So here is the video:

[video type="youtube" clip_id="Uk52AFwbJG0" autohide="0"]

Feel free to leave comments!

5 ways to teach yourself anything

I used to love school. Really. I loved school because I liked being around my friends, because every day was different, but also because I liked learning things. I've always been interested in learning new things.

I studied mechanical engineering because I was good at all scientific subjects and I liked to understand how things worked (although my husband often wonders how I got my degree :) ). But then I did an extra year to study marketing. It was a completely different field, but I loved it and this dual competence really served me in my career so far.



Soon after, I began working as a marketing assistant, and it might well be then that I started learning the most. I had to learn about the corporate world, about conducting meetings, running projects, organizing trade shows, preparing press releases, replying to RFQs, all the things that the job would throw at me. One aspect that particularly interested me was the design part of marketing materials. We relied on agencies to create our brochures, but I wanted to learn how to do it myself. So I did just that and today I'm able to design a brochure, retouch a photo, code some HTML and even more.

In fact, if I think about it, I taught myself many things: drawing portraits, drawing cartoons, using photoshop with advanced techniques, sewing, crocheting, cooking, Email marketing, all sorts of things, without spending a fortune.

Lessons I learned during a business workshop

Last week I participated in a full day workshop organised at work by our management team. The whole company is going through this process, with every employee participating in one of the four workshops planned over the next few weeks. The workshops are designed partly to improve cooperation between employees but also to work together on a chosen business case.



We had an external coach come in and facilitate the day, which took place off site in a hotel conference room. The coach had everything organised before we arrived and set us to work in three teams, each consisting of people of different age, department or career advancement.

The day basically consisted of a series of team exercises that would help us formulate a proposal to be presented in front of the management team later on. The exercises were all creative, using various techniques (brainstorming, frenzies, 6 thinking hats methods), all helping us put a proposal to shape with the help of flipcharts, post-its and markers. Being quite creative myself I have to say it was quite a bit of fun.

Lessons we learned  during the workshop

At the end of the day, we had 3 proposals to present to the managers, so that was the first concrete outcome of the workshop, one to the benefit of the company.

But we also spent some time discussing how we felt after such a focused day, and we could all agree that such a workshop was great for anyone to work on the following skills:

• Cooperation
  Every one had a role to play, whether facilitating an exercise, keeping track of time, writing on the flipchart or presenting something.

• Communication
  Since we all had to present in front of an audience at some point, that was a good exercise. People had to remember to speak clearly and loud and organize their ideas.

• Planning and Organisation
  We had to make the most of the short allotted time slots we had for each exercise, and learned a few things along the way: manage time effectively (use time blocks, start and finish on time), define clear roles in the team and be specific in your project proposal: specify deliverables, resources, time constraints, budget, etc.

•  Creativity
  Workshops can be a lot of fun with all the tools available, but we can sometimes run dry of new ideas. Using various techniques to boost creativity is a great way of ensuring fresh ideas coming up all the time. Techniques we used included for example: brainstorming, the 6 thinking hats, frenzies, asking questions on different perspectives.

But what I found particularly amazing was that we ended up with three excellent but very different proposals. Although we all had the same instructions, tools and exercises, our proposals differed not only by their content or the way they were presented, but also by the way they were put together: one was very structured, with clear drivers, action plans and KPIs; another one was very specific, focusing on a particular action to implement while the last one was far more generic and focused on creating a mindset more than actions.

Overall I enjoyed the experience and I am glad that my company organised the worshop. What about you, have you already organised workshops for your staff?

photo credit: pinkpurse via photopin cc